by Harry Warner, Jr.
You can call me many things with accuracy. But the person who says I'm systematic is either a chronic liar or thinking about someone else. All the small supply of neatness and order with which I was equipped at birth has evaporated over the decades. Except for one trivial, useless survivor of that early instinct to do things properly. Like a newly hanged man who absent-mindedly persists in reaching with his feet for the floor that he knows perfectly well isn't there, I continue a correspondence record. It serves little purpose, but I cling to it as a sliver of sensible conduct. I have this suspicion that my entire environment would turn inconsistent and inexplicable, just like a Phil Dick novel's setting, if I ever gave up that correspondence record.
It's primitive, consisting only of the date the item arrived, the last name of the letter writer or the title of the magazine, and the date the item was written or published or postmarked. But it's enough to provide some frightening insight into aspects of fandom other than my unsystematic self. I've been looking back over the correspondence data for previous years in which Science Fiction Five Yearly was due. I'm appalled at two things, both of which I already know so well that I shouldn't have reminded myself this way. There's a stupendous turnover in fandom within each five-year span and fans and fanzines whom I must have liked very much when active and have now vanished totally from my memory.
I'm writing this late in June of 1976. Only in fandom could nostalgia result from thinking about the entries for late June of 1971, because things are born, flourish and wither so much more rapidly in fandom than in most parts of the space-time continuum. The only letter I received on June 16 five years ago won't be nostalgic to me, because the name of the writer, Tuttle, doesn't arouse any specific memories today. I'll hate myself for admitting this fact, because as sure as fate, a fan named Tuttle who wrote me a letter on June 11, 1971, will read this article some day and experience all the emotions that this specialized form of snubbing by a faulty memory must create.
But the next day, a couple of fanzines arrived that awaken fine recollections. One was the ninth issue of Dallascon Bulletin. Dallas fandom never achieved the worldcon that they published this fanzine for. But it grew into an entertaining publication aside from its missionary purpose. I seem to remember that several fans connected with it became a little later big names in mundane pulp fiction fandom. An issue of Focal Point also came that June 17. There are several excellent newszines today, but nobody seems to have just now the knack of publishing a newszine that stays small and frequent like the Arnie Katz - rich brown endeavor.
Curiously, two surviving fanzines put issues into my mailbox on June 18 five years ago. Instant Message, the NESFA bulletin, was already up to its 84th issue five years ago, and SFCommentary's 20th issue had just reached me. But who can remember today some of the other fanzines that came in the next few days: the second issue of Libel, an issue of Sentry which apparently wasn't numbered or dated because that column is blank in my record, and the third issue of something called Chad? I can't remember a thing about them. Some of the letter writers in the last couple weeks of June have familiar names but they seem hopelessly lost to fandom. There was a postal card from Jerry Lapidus, who just quit FAPA because the theater has claimed all his interest, a letter from Larry Farasce, the once famous Rochester, N.Y., collector and publisher of Golden Atom who is now deeply engrossed in poetry fandom, a letter I wrote to Mike Raub who became famous by living and conducting fanac in a church before his semi-gafiation, and saddest of all, the note indicating that I wrote on June 23 a letter to George Heap.
It's even harder to find the familiar names and faces in the entries for the last half of June, 1966. On June 20, I received letters from two other fans who are now dead: Harold Piser, who claimed he didn't like fans or fandom but wanted to update the Fanzine Index because he liked to create catalogs, and Herbert Haussler, who suffered many misfortunes during World War Two, found himself in the DDR at its conclusion, and kept up a correspondence with a few fans despite his inability to receive magazines or books in East Germany.
Fans who know Ted Pauls today as a convention fan and book dealer might not believe it, but the 103rd issue of his good-sized fanzine, Kipple, reached me in that period. It was one of the last important fanzines that emphasized mundane current events. My memory is shakier about another fanzine, the 29th issue of Vorhut. It sounds like a German fanzine, and yet I connect it somehow in my mind with Serge Hutin, a French borderline fan who published an impressive paperback book on Masonry. There's the May, 1966, issue of G2 causing me to wonder if Joe Gibson will come up for the third time. He was quite active in the 1940's, vanished for a long while, then reappeared in the 1960's to put out lots of issues of this fanzine with the help of his wife, only to gafiate a second time as abruptly and totally as anyone ever has quit fandom. He just decided that he was more interested in old airplanes than in fandom, as far as I could determine. Another letter entry is the name of Les Gerber. Younger fans and the oldest fans may not remember him, but he had a meteoric career in New York City fandom, his enemies immortalized his name by inventing the term gerberizing to mean the act of inadvertently doing a person harm by an effort to praise or defend him, and Les eventually became a major authority on records. The last I heard, he was living in Phoenecia, N.Y., producing historical recordings on lp dubbings.
The old nostalgia juice really starts flowing when I look at the entries for the same period in 1961. I was out of town on vacation during the final days of that June so I can't be sure exactly when some of the stuff reached Hagerstown. But on July 3 I picked up the accumulated mail, not realizing how fabulous some of the fanzines in the stack would seem a mere fifteen years later. In that stack was the 28th issue of Hyphen, probably the most-wanted fanzine today except for those which have become rare because they're connected with a celebrated pro. The fifth issue of Xero, Dick Lupoff's fanzine which had much to do with making comics fandom respectable enough to result in professional books dealing with the comics field and reprints of famous strips in book form, Shaggy, the LASFS clubzine which was in its 56th issue, nearing the end of its best years which saw it edited at one time or another by everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles fandom. (Ken Rudolph put out a few issues perhaps five years ago that were its final manifestation, as far as I know.) Other fabled fanzines like Axe, Scribble and SAM. Just before I left town, I'd received one of the finest of all fanzine anthologies, the ATom collection which Ella Parker largely instigated.
(Illo: Steve Stiles cartoon: (1) Steve Stiles: "Fellow fen, I must confess - I find it difficult nay, impossible to illustrate this article." (2) Still Steve Stiles: "This is NOT to say that Harry's article is BAD or without value. No, no! (3) Steve Stiles' right profile -- buy, this is an ego trip! "It's just that I've done hundreds of "fanzine collection" cartoons and I find myself "burned out" on the subject..." (4) "my nose" (5) "...so... I'm duplicating some illustrations from a 'zine Harry mentions -- THE ATOM ANTHOLOGY! (Are these folk still in FAPA?) )
Also from late June in 1961 I find entries for two postal cards from Les Nirenberg, whose wonderful ability to write humorously was bestowed on fandom for a few years, then lost when he discovered his ability to make money out of it in mundane fields. A letter from Art Rapp, whose publishing and writing career covered several decades; now he's living in Baltimore with his wife, the former Nancy Share, his activity confined to SAPS. I was still taperesponding in that year, because I received in this period a tape from Bruce Pelz which I suspect was a very dear treasure, Forry Ackerman rambling for the better part of an hour about his career, and another tape from Wrai Ballard, still living in the wilds of the Dakotas at the time. He later moved to Seattle, married a fan, and he was also concentrating his remaining fannish energies on SAPS, the last I heard.
But who published in 1961 the fanzines that arrived in this period like the second issue of Heptagon, and undated and unnumbered issue of Odysseus and the first issue of Prose of Kilimanjaro? When I can't remember, I find lukewarm comfort in realizing one fact. There have been an awful lot of fans coming and going during the 1960's and 1970's, they've published a lot of short-lived fanzines, and I suspect that even a veteran fan with a good memory would have trouble remembering all such fans and fanzines with nothing to help him but hastily scribbled entries in a correspondence record.
-- Harry Warner, Jr.
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(illo by Dan Steffan: "A successful fan relationship is based on the ability to iron out your difficulties with others!")
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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